Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  Greta wanted some reassurance that Henry was watching his step, because she didn’t want to find out about one thing or another through the grapevine. If anything was going on, she wanted to be the first to know. That was the least she could expect, as she had said over and over again ever since she had been left on her own with the boys. Henry had always promised to keep her informed. And for the most part he did, but lately he’d become less informative, and often he wouldn’t come home in the middle of the week. She didn’t like it.

  Something had happened to Henry recently; he had become so grown- up all of a sudden. It now seemed a long time ago that he was the little boy with all those big ideas. He had always sold the most lottery tickets for the Athletic Association’s Christmas Lottery, which started up in August. He had always distributed the most advertising circulars to letterboxes, and he had always collected the most empty bottles. He had organised the boys in his building to join forces to collect bottles, which was more efficient. They were allowed to use a storage space in the cellar for the hundreds of bottles they gathered until they filled several prams and went over to the state off-licence to turn them in for cash.

  But that was all very long ago. Henry was still boxing, but he was undoubtedly more interested in Dixieland and girls. That much Greta could see. All of a sudden Henry had become a young man.

  But on this particular evening in the late winter of 1961, he was eating like a horse, and that was enough to make any worried mother rest easy for a while. Henry had blithely shovelled down five stuffed cabbage rolls with lingonberry sauce and at least as many potatoes. Leo merely sat and picked at his food while a snorting Henry cut slices as thick as phone books from the soft cheese. But at least Leo did his homework. He was so smart that he had skipped a year in school.

  ‘Just think if those two had been one boy,’ their grandfather used to say. That horrendous thought said a lot.

  ‘Eat your hetvägg, boys,’ said Greta as she placed a few cream-filled buns and some warm milk on the oilcloth. She was probably the only person in all of Sweden, except for foreigners and those members of her family still living on Storm Island in the archipelago, who called cream buns hetvägg instead of semla. Henry stuffed them down as he listened to the radio and read the evening paper all at the same time. Everyone was commenting on the Match, but Henry merely shook his head. It was the end of Ingo, for good. And Henry hadn’t fared much better. He was also done in, and he went to bed early. Leo did his homework in the kitchen, while Greta ironed shirts. She found one that Henry claimed to have bought. It had the initials W.S. inside the collar. Because she was thinking so hard, that particular shirt ended up being ironed with special attention. It would not surprise me if here and there the cotton were damp from her tears, although that may sound a bit too maudlin.

  ________

  ‘Everything took place just as it does on Earth … My handwriting was the same, even though my hands didn’t weigh a thing. But I had to hold on tight to the notebook so that it wouldn’t float away,’ said Gagarin. It’s the same with the Morgan brothers. You have to hold on tight to them, etch them into scenes so that they won’t float away into memory and the everlasting ice-cold space of the mind – just like in some terrible nightmare from which you have to free yourself, over and over again.

  Perhaps it was Henry’s well-developed talent for attaching his life to great turning points in history that made him claim that he was lying in Maud’s lap on that morning when the world learned that Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin had orbited around the Earth in space. The two of them, at any rate, didn’t give a damn about Gagarin.

  Maud went over to the window, pulled up the shade, and looked out across Östermalmsgatan and Engelbrektskyrka, which was chiming nine o’clock. She lived in an English brick building covered with ivy on Friggagatan, in the Sånglärkan district. It was a beautiful flat, filled with erotic wooden figures from Indonesia.

  ‘It’s spring now, Henry,’ she said. ‘Listen!’ She threw open the window. The birds were twittering, and the rooftops and pavement smelled exactly the way they should when warmed by the April sun. ‘Pretty soon that icicle is going to fall,’ she said, nodding at an enormous icicle that pointed towards the street like a lance. ‘I’m afraid of icicles …’

  ‘They’re just water,’ said Henry. ‘They’re great in drinks.’

  ‘You’re a real tough guy, aren’t you?’ said Maud.

  ‘I can’t deny that I do have a few muscles,’ said Henry, kneading his right bicep. ‘At any rate, I’m not scared of icicles. My brother Leo, on the other hand, he’s really scared of icicles. He’s scared of most things. Sometimes he has an absolute fit and lies in bed, raving all night long. My mum has to put cold flannels on his ankles and forehead to calm him down.’

  ‘Just because of icicles?’

  ‘Because of anything! It doesn’t take much,’ said Henry. ‘A week ago he came running up the hall and then threw off his clothes and lay down on his bed, shaking with fever or cold, and he was raving too. He said that he was walking along the pavement on Hornsgatan behind a woman with a pram, and all of a sudden a whole load of icicles came plunging down. At least a ton of icicles, he said. And they all landed right on that pram. The whole thing was smashed to a pulp, and the woman was hysterically digging through all that ice to find her baby. And she cut her hands, which started to bleed and get numb, but finally she pulled out the baby. “He’s alive!” she screamed, even though the baby was nothing but pulp.’

  ‘Did he see the dead baby?!’ said Maud, looking quite broken-hearted.

  ‘There wasn’t any baby,’ said Henry. ‘It was just Leo being delirious – he imagined the whole thing. I think he’s starting to go bonkers. He’s been doing too much homework.’

  ‘I think you’re the one who’s nuts,’ said Maud.

  ‘In that case, we’re both nuts,’ said Henry. ‘You and me, I mean.’

  Maud sat in the spring sunshine, enjoying herself. Henry looked at her for a long time as she leaned out the window. She was the only female he had ever seen move around completely naked without seeming bashful or claiming that it was getting cold, as a pretext for covering herself up with something. She had a body that didn’t really fit the usual perception of the female body, the perception that belonged to Rubens or Zorn – two names that she had taught Henry the mongrel – which was also shared by Pin-Up magazine – a name that Henry had learned all on his own. Maud didn’t fit that mould at all. There was something Asian about her looks, with her small breasts and narrow hips, black hair and extraordinary cat-eyes, which looked good with any sort of make-up. The women that Henry had actually been with were few in number, when it came right down to it; they were also so shy that they never let him look at them in the way in which he, with his insatiable desire, would have liked. They were just childish girls from school who sat in front of the radio whenever the Top Forty was on; girls who knew by heart ‘I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door, Ring on Your Bell’, by Eddie Hodges; girls who mostly wanted to talk about school, settling down and having babies. Today they were all talking about Gagarin. Henry didn’t give a damn about that. Everyone was talking about Gagarin except Maud and him.

  She was now sitting on the window seat, letting the sunlight flood over her body. Henry could stay there in bed and look right inside her if he liked. She closed her dark eyes, turned her face towards the sun and let him stare as much as he pleased.

  ‘The one thing about you that reminds me of Sophia Loren is your eyes,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t give a damn whether I look like Sophia Loren or Aunt Fritzi or the Virgin Mary,’ said Maud. ‘Quit nagging at me!’

  ‘But I’m the nagging type,’ said Henry. ‘I know that. But you remind me of all of them. Sophia Loren is the primal mother, Aunt Fritzi is the stepmother and the Virgin Mary is the womb. Although, in reality, you don’t remind me of any of them.’

  ‘I get along fine without any of them,’ said Maud.

  ‘That’s exa
ctly right,’ said Henry. ‘Have you got any cigarettes? I’m out.’

  ‘“I’m out,”’ Maud mimicked him with a laugh. ‘It’ll be a cold day in hell when you have any of your own.’

  Maud got up and opened the cupboard under the window seat, which was filled with cartons of cigarettes with tax-free seals. W.S. bought them on his travels around the world. Henry knew that quite well even though he didn’t say anything. As he had been told, Maud got along fine without being reminded of anything. She didn’t want to hear any reminders at all when they were together. They were not going to talk about either W.S. or Gagarin.

  Henry lit a king-size Pall Mall and took a few drags, blowing a couple of tight smoke rings towards Maud and using the saucer under the bed as an ashtray. ‘With you, I can love all women in one,’ he said, and he was totally serious. ‘For me you’re more of a human being than a woman. At one time I thought I was going to be gay.’

  ‘That’s what all little boys think before they grow up.’

  ‘You have such small breasts …’

  ‘If they’re not good enough, you know where the door is. This flat is small too.’

  ‘I have a friend,’ said Henry, ‘who woke up in terror one night. He’d been having a nightmare and he was in a cold sweat. He had dreamt about a hermaphrodite. He had met the most fabulous woman on earth, but when they were going to make love, he discovered that the broad had balls. He woke up in a panic and discovered that he was lying in bed with one hand on his girl’s breast and the other between his own legs. Some sort of short- circuit had occurred in his dream.’

  ‘All right, you’d better stop telling all these lies!’ said Maud, laughing so hard that snot came out of her nose.

  ‘Come here, Fritzi!’ said Henry, stubbing out his cigarette.

  ‘You’re a strange one,’ said Maud, crawling back under the covers.

  As I said, they didn’t say a word about Gagarin that morning. They didn’t give a damn about Russian fools taking notes up there in space. For that matter, they didn’t give a damn about W.S. either.

  ________

  The night they first met was now a few months in the past, and both of them already thought of it as swathed in a romantic glow, like in one of the new French films, or in a book by Salinger or in a really pleasant tune.

  One night a few of the city’s best school bands were asked to play at the Gazell in Gamla Stan, and Henry had shown up with a quartet that he wasn’t at all pleased with, but it would have to do. This was his second quartet, and they had previously played a dozen tunes for a school dance. It was the standard combination of a piano, bass, drums and clarinet. At the school dance they had planned on playing a mix of songs, but everyone mostly wanted music they could dance to. Since they didn’t want to disappoint their audience, the band had stuck to livelier tunes.

  But at the Gazell they could really cut loose. The audience was older, more mature, and they wanted to hear the real cool numbers that they could get into and really dig. The people who went to the Gazell were deep. Henry thought that was great, and he tried to play some cool music, but the lads from school couldn’t really follow. The clarinet sounded much too shrill and screechy, and it didn’t work even when the soloist tried to imitate Acker Bilk. Henry yelled at his group and told them that they needed to think about styles other than Dixieland, because Dixieland could end up being out someday, no matter how odd that might sound.

  Even so, their set at the Gazell went great – but then maybe the audience wasn’t expecting much. Later in the evening the Bear Quartet was going to play. It was a group well-known to aficionados, those who were deep and truly wanted to get down into the jazz, to sit with their eyes shut, quietly swaying their heads, while they smoked a cigarette, drank a little red wine and so on. The Bear Quartet itself was known for being a group of very deep guys – at least in the interviews in Orchesterjournalen. They had all played bop and Dixieland and were familiar with the full range. These days they were playing in a slightly avant-garde style, which mostly involved playing longer solos.

  At any rate, there was an irrefutable air of mystery surrounding the guys who played in the Bear Quartet. Henry didn’t know them personally, but he knew that his father, the Jazz Baron, had played a session with them, and he’d said that when their time came, those boys were going to be big. Maybe their time had now come.

  It was undeniable that they looked deep. Two of them wore black berets, one of them had a beard and long hair down to his neck. But the fourth one wasn’t there. Three quarters of the Bear Quartet were now sitting on stage: the drummer, bass player and tenor saxophonist, but the pianist was missing. He was somewhere in the club, but no one knew exactly where.

  Suddenly the tenor-sax player, who was very tall, stood up and started moving among the tables and audience, heading straight for Henry, who was sitting with a Kornett beer, quenching his thirst after his set. ‘So you’re Henry Morgan, is that right?’ said the guy wearing the shades.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Henry.

  ‘I knew your dad. We were thinking of playing a tune for him tonight. I liked him. He was one of the best.’

  Henry didn’t really know what to say. He didn’t know what to do either until he was on his way back to the stage to sit in with the group.

  ‘So the thing is,’ the tenor-sax player began speaking from the stage, ‘our pianist just got sick over in the bar, and he took off. We don’t know where, but we’ve found someone to fill in for him, someone you saw earlier,’ he went on. He was apparently the only member of the Bear Quartet who spoke to the audience. The drummer fumbled his brushes over the high-hat, while the bass player leaned meditatively on his bass. Henry was nervous that he might forget the changes that were scribbled on a piece of paper propped up on the piano. ‘This is going to be a bit ad lib,’ said the tenor-sax player to the audience. ‘Improvised, you know. We’re going to open with a tune called ‘The Baron’, and it’s dedicated to the Jazz Baron.’

  The sax player counted off for the quartet, and they started up. It went slow and sounded cool, exactly the way Henry wanted it to sound, and he got lost only once. After a long sax solo, he got to take over, and he played well. The audience was turned on and applauded heartily. Henry sat in with the Bear Quartet for the rest of the evening, taking it in like the breakthrough that it was.

  The night didn’t end until some time around two a.m. A handful of real enthusiasts were still there when the sax player with the beret and shades took his last solo, sounding as avant-garde as hell.

  Henry was offered a Kornett beer, and he sat down at a table to unwind with a cigarette. He felt wiped out and couldn’t really fathom the whole thing.

  ‘That was fucking great, my boy,’ said the tenor-sax player as he sat down next to Henry. ‘My name’s Bill.’

  They shook hands, and the saxophonist named Bill laughed, revealing big white teeth in the middle of his unshaven face. Only now, outside the spotlight, did he take off his shades for a moment to press a cold lager to his eyelids.

  ‘Great night, Bill,’ said a girl from the darkness. ‘Great night!’

  ‘Sure,’ said Bill. ‘I don’t think you know Henry Morgan,’ he went on, nodding at Henry. ‘He’s the angel who came to our rescue tonight. This is Eva and Maud.’

  The girl named Eva came over to the musicians’ table, bringing along the girl named Maud. They looked to be about Henry’s age, both of them; real Dixieland broads wearing tight black slacks and Icelandic wool sweaters. No doubt they also wear duffel coats when it’s cold out, thought Henry.

  ‘You look so funny in that tie,’ said Eva. Henry was embarrassed and offended, and she noticed that at once. ‘Don’t feel bad about it. Bill doesn’t look much better.’

  ‘So, what shall we do now?’ said Bill.

  ‘We could go over to my place, if you want,’ said the girl named Eva, looking around the table.

  ‘Of course we do,’ said Bill. ‘What do you say, Henry?’

  �
�Sure,’ said Henry. ‘I just to have to buy some cigarettes.’

  They went over to the other quartet members who were sitting there with a bottle of wine, looking more deep than ever, and Bill set the time for the next rehearsal. Then he said something about Henry that no one else could hear.

  That early March morning was bitterly cold and oppressive. Eva and Maud, as predicted, wore duffel coats, but they were still freezing. No buses or trams were running at that time of night, but as luck would have it, Eva lived near Odenplan, so they just had to walk up Drottninggatan. They were talking about Paris; all of them had been there – except for Henry.

  ‘Paris is the place, all right,’ said Bill, shivering. ‘It’s never this fucking cold in Paris. And if it does get cold at night, there are always plenty of bars where it’s warm inside. Fucking warm.’

  ‘I saw Sartre there one night last autumn,’ said Eva. ‘He was so short and sweet.’

  ‘He’s fucking powerful,’ said Bill. ‘Dirty Hands, man, what a play! So powerful …’

  ‘Have you read anything by Sartre?’ asked the girl named Maud, who was leaning on Henry’s arm.

  ‘I hardly read anything,’ he said. ‘Maybe Damon Runyon. Guys and Dolls, I like that one.’

  He could tell that Bill and these girls were not like the people he was used to. They had got so deep from reading that heavy Frenchman’s books that the teachers were always talking about at school. Henry read Guys and Dolls and thought it was good, but he had never opened a book by Sartre. Nor did he think he ever would.